First of all. What is visitware?

Whilst racking my brain to allure more access to my homepage, I come up with an idea in that I make a useful software and give it away. If I made visiting my homepage the condition, I thought, I could secure visitors as many as the software users.

The software is not a freeware nor a shareware. Since anybody uses the software for free provided that the user visit the author's homepage, the soft must be called visitware. This is how I have started visitware movement.

An ordinary commercial software cannot be evaluated easily. It's risky and you cannot tell the usability before you pay. Another shortcoming is that a commercial software needs to pay the distribution costs and therefore can not be cheeper than the certain price. To justify the price, you may add superficial functions which merely make the soft slow and difficult to use.

A shareware, on the other hand, has its own problem. Too few people register and pay compare with those who use it. Many people pinch a free ride on shareware authors and registered users of good will. This, however, is the problem of more of difficulty to pay than the price, if you put yourself in the user's place. It's especially true for the payment to be made to the foreign country from the country under the strict foreign exchange control.

Getting money is not freeware's problem since there is no money to get. But if there is no reward at all, then how we the world can persuade a man of good idea or ability to make a useful software.

Now, here comes visitware. User tries first and if it fails, he will be none the worse for it as the software is free of charge. An author can write a small but easy to use program regardless of distribution costs.

Internet will be more and more popular. Therefore if visiting the author's homepage is the condition to use the software, the most of people do not think it very troublesome and will fulfill the obligation. What the user is ought to do is nothing but clicking a mouse. Even before such duty is invented, people have visited a programmer's homepage to see if the latest virsion is ready or just out of curiosity.

Visitware also appeals programmers and Sunday programmers. Having more of visitors to one's homepage is not bad thing. And if the number of visitors is big enough, you can sell a banner space for profit. So far we haven't had a system to collect ¢5-¢10 from each software user. But by selling a banner space a programmer can indirectly charge the most of users a small fee. This is in direct opposition to the current, few good users being pinched for a free ride by a great many.

If the visitware is established as a distribution channel and widely employed, more of better softwares will be available and they will be available without loading the users much responsibility. Visitware will be beneficial to both software users and authors.

There are, however, still two problems. One is the inventor, me. How can I reward myself who came up with this great idea? If visitware gives no advantage to me, why do I spend time and effort on promoting the idea? Secondly, who will be visitware author? Apart from few professional programmers, "homepage" is a place of passage for the most of Sunday programmers whose URL will be changed when they switch Internet Service Providers. How can you say "my homepage address is so-and-so, please visit if you use my software" while you do not know when the software reach the customer and when you relocate your homepage again.

Here comes a good idea. I, the inventor of visitware system, take the domain name "visitware.com" and you, will be visitware author, register your name with me and are assigned URL. The URL will be http://www.visitware.com/author name/. Your handle comes to "author name". In this way, you does not need to notify all of your software users, and users in future, around world, every time you change ISP.

I will give you homepage space, email redirect, mailing-list, etc. besides permanent URL. Anyway I got them when I bought the web-space from the web-hosting company. Nowadays a real web-hosting company do not sell a small disk-space of 5-10MB. So I have plenty to give away. And I do give away as far as you want to be a part of visitware movement. Let me insert a small visitware adertisement at the bottom of your top page in return.

visitware statute (draft)

A visitware is a free of charge software in which visiting the author's homepage is the condition of usage. A user is obligated to visit the author's homepage at least once except he does not have internet access.

A visitware author registers his handle, software and homepage with visitware.com and is assigned URL. URL will be http://www.visitware.com/author name/ in which the author's handle will replace "author name".

A third party can distribute or modify visitware as far as he follows "about visitware". He does not need to pay nor obtain an agreement from the author.

A party distributing visitware or a product based on it has to attach the full text of "about visitware" in which address of the homepage to visit is designated and claims and obligations of a user, a distributor, a rewriter or any other parties involved are specified.